rwandering.net

Vista has a cool feature called “Problem Reports and Solutions”. This tracks problems and periodically looks for their solutions. These kinds of problems include system and application failures, connectivity issues, etc.

Today it notified me it found a new solution, so I immediately went to see what it was:

Of course, immediately I thought which problem with Windows Vista? And I’m not being sarcastic here. I’ve had several intermittent issues with Vista related to networking, hibernation / sleep, sluggishness, etc. (btw, the sarcasm is best applied to the possible solutions ;).

So I clicked on the link and got a dialog with this further information:

Again, my question of which problem. Nothing in the main part of the text says anything other than “the problem” and the “Technical Information” box describes some generic problems.

I would like to see two improvements here:

1. Improve the solution title

Instead of “the problem”, how about:

Follow these steps to improve the reliability of Windows Vista.

The actual title may be limited to the software product to which it relates. If so, that is a shortcoming, because the actual messaging is pretty unhelpful . . . and it opens Microsoft up to further sarcastic jabs.

2. Provide more information about why this solution was chosen for me

The dialog is pretty unhelpful. Instead of sending me to the knowledge base, how about some specifics about my own machine? Something like:

There are X problem reports on your system indicating that this update will improve the functioning of your system. Click “here” to view these reports.

I would actually like to know specifically what this update is intended to fix.

Robert W. Anderson RT @OffTheBat: Follow us & RT for your chance to win this signed hat by @BringerOfRain20! Rules: http://www.mtv.com/onair... #OffTheBat https://twitter.com/OffTheB... July 28 from Twitter - Comment - Like